There Must Be Some Way Out of Here: metaphor-mangling meta-thoughts on S12, 12 x 22, 12 x 23

You can break a story's bones, but you can't break its heart. I think I wrote down a (cheesy line) like that more than a year ago, when SPN also asked us to imagine a world without Winchesters (if in a more abstract way)-- but I still believe in it.

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If S12 SPN conversation (as in, its conversation, maybe argument, with itself) has been about Small v. Big (throwback cops-and-robbers intimacy vs. post- Lucifer cosmic consequences, which are, yeah, sequelae of other, older conversations) then, OK, its last word has been to tie its heroes up in a familial love knot, kill heaven and hell (their reps, anyway), and tear itself a new A...U. Could be a cosmic clusterfuck. Could be a narrative clusterfuck. Or both. In a way it's bold, like taking a grenade launcher to your own text. Breathe air into it like those Bunker fans kicking to life. Sort of.

Metalandscapes interest me (though not as much as landscapes)--and timespace boundary-crossing canonverse without its own heroes might be their most meta move ever (yeah, more than when Sam was Polish, heh). Like SPN is asking itself: magic your way out or blow open a door? What would Dean Winchester do? Maybe blast us open a portal from not-genre-dreck into not-your-mother's-dystopia. Even if it just serves well, fanservice, or the play of character resurrection without the character, or just to teach the Winchesters (again) that they are, in fact, necessary, make them live up again to their own Gospels.

But also--one of my favorite things about SPN is that mashup of the mundane and the, if not sacred, then epic, mythic, fantastical. I have yet to find footing in rich concreteness, emotional and otherwise, in S12, references to shampoo and underwear aside: break the bones but don't lose the heart (yeah, I know, some say that Chevy has sailed, it sailed a long time ago, and some might say, well, now heaven and hell look dead-ish but for the hellspawn on earth, and also 12 x 22 and the Winchester love knot: ain't that heart? Yeah. But do we trust a textual/extratextual reality-rip not to break it, when SPN already has so much dimensional leeway? I dunno.

On the earthly plane: since S12 is kind of a frontier narrative (The Raid!), however playful or not the cheeseburger-eating flannel-wearing Die-Hard-and-Scarface-quoting/aping American hunters vs British technocolonials with an overlay of J.K. Rowling, I don't know how much depth or clarity they got out of the civilization vs. savagery themes (so much more to consider, esp. the layer that includes the possibility of monster genocide, hunters/monsters etc.) But they did, however, give us 12 x 22 Sammy leading the farmers with pitchforks instead of say, hell's minions - a long-game feel to the feels of 12 x 22, for sure: Who We Were/Who We Are.

So I'll take away Dean's tears and Sam's fire, maybe the passel of hunters (including the ones who set them to knocking on heaven's door in the first place, and Jody); I'll guess I'll take that blaze-of-glory metaphor/not-metaphor, if it means they might write their own endings.

Winchester love, said the joker to the thief: I'll take that.

Also: thank you S12, for the witch twins, but I'll miss Rowena. We'll see what all the dimensions have in store for Cas and Crowley...